I agree, as some have mentioned .... what's missing would be mobs spawning in the dark, challenges... also the nether world! I love those adventures collecting glowstones and killing ghasts in minecraft.

Wouldn't a better question be... what can Minetest have, which minecraft does not?

That is the way of thinking I would most love to see happening, rather than comparing to minecraft any longer...It has been going on for so long now.It's time to start focusing on and pushing toward having differences, rather than similarities.

Minecraft is beginning to level off and plateau... and Hytale will be the new trend.

I think the problem is that MineTest is way to easy. You can just give ourselves the "fly" ability by codes. Also MineTest is lacking background music which make it a lot duller. The colors aren't that bright too. Even I feel like you!

BlazeGamingUnltd wrote:I think the problem is that MineTest is way to easy. You can just give ourselves the "fly" ability by codes.

you can also not use the codes to give yourself super powers :P

if you can't fly by default, it is not part of the game.system commands to control time and space are a feature for administration and testing.on multiplayer servers, those are disabled for players to use. you can only use them in your singleplayer world because "singleplayer" is the admin of that world.

MirceaKitsune wrote:Yet for some reason, I can't help but notice something I can't pin down to a specific fault. Even when a Minetest server has large cities, a lot of mods, many active players, or any feature you would expect... it simply doesn't feel as compelling as Minecraft. The environment feels more dull, and it gives the impression there isn't really anything to do. Obviously this isn't a critique... I'm simply confused what is missing, and how it can be improved most of all.

From a more personal perspective: Whenever I go on a crowded Minecraft server, I quickly start interacting with the environment as well as people. Getting materials, tools, building a house, going underground to mine, etc. I never really get bored... something palpable is almost always going on, and the environment feels very alive itself. Yet when I join a Minetest server, I don't feel like there is much to do; I can farm just like in MC, but don't really feel like bothering. There are hostile mobs, but I don't feel like there's any fun to fight them. There are beautiful cities with very nice houses, yet I don't feel like getting a house there. And the environment feels well... very static and dead. Usually I just parkour around spawn, look at what people are chatting, and eventually make a little house somewhere then get bored and leave.

What's missing really?

It may be the quality of mods/games.

MC is extremely popular so has far more people making mods for it, and therefore far more talented people making mods.MC mods require much more programming talent to create than MT mods/games, so mods are more likely to be created by talented programmers.There is a far larger choice of high quality mods for servers to choose from, so servers are likely to be higher quality.

I still far prefer MT over MC though, despite this.More low quality servers than MC could be seen as a good thing as it may be a result of ease of use and ease of access.

MirceaKitsune wrote:Yet for some reason, I can't......What's missing really?

It may be the quality of mods/games.

MC is extremely popular so has far more people making mods for it, and therefore far more talented people making mods.MC mods require much more programming talent to create than MT mods/games, so mods are more likely to be created by talented programmers.There is a far larger choice of high quality mods for servers to choose from, so servers are likely to be higher quality.

I still far prefer MT over MC though, despite this.More low quality servers than MC could be seen as a good thing as it may be a result of ease of use and ease of access.

No better mods or talented modders in Minecraft than in Minetest. No way!

More popular does not imply better in all. I mean proportionally. If in Minecraft there are 1000 modders, and 100 good ones, for Minetest the proportion would be 100 to 10. The same thing...

In Minecraft, there are no games...

A great issue in Minecraft related to mods is that Minecraft is not for modding. Each version breaks all the mods. You have to download and update mod by mod and cross your fingers that the developer does not abandon his mod/s.

Minecraft has a lot of... abandoned, and the worst, no working mods because of all the different game versions. I never did a Minecraft mod, for what? I thought... in one or two months will be no operative.

Modding in Minecraft is a terrible thing. Well, especially in servers, yes it has some basic mods/tools (Essential i.e.). But not too much more. There are much more mods for Minetest than for Minecraft. You can create Minetest mods for both single and multiplayer (if you make the things all right, this is, thinking from the server side). In Minecraft, they are two completely separated worlds. You can do few things in a server with the mods in Minecraft. For example, you can not have mobs mods, well, I mean your players have to have the exact fu**** injected Minecraft than your server. And the good mods, are outdated and buggy, Towny, Millenaire...

To maintain Minecraft server is a hell. I remember to use in my private server Bukkit, Spiggot... all full of bugs, too much lag... millions of versions. Terrible! The solution: to use the vanilla (simple) server and basic mods.

Minetets have a lot of better mods than Minecraft. In an example: deco mods, in Minetest there are 3 at least, in Minecraft servers = 0 (3 years ago when I played Minecraft, there was only one at least, really bad and a lot of buggy).

But does Minecraft needs mods like Minetest?I really don't know, I've never played Minecraft.I suppose the advantage of Minecraft (ignoring marketing issues) is that the game has a goal. Minetest as a subgame engine does not have.Maybe a good default survival mode can solve that.

Things minetest has over minecraft: (in my opinion)- a FAR more advanced equivalent to redstone (mesecons obviously)- Advanced trains - a fully fledged realistic train system. (seriously, who doesn't love trains :D)- mods don't break every version because minetest has a modding API. - its an engine. meaning its possible to completely start from scratch and make something completely different. such as Minetest Saturn.- since minetest games don't mod the client, you can have a few dozen of them, and launch any one easily.- you can customize your mod selection per-map (try doing that with minecraft :p)- all the user needs to connect to any server, is a compatible version of the client. mods are handled by the server.

That's all I have to say really. Movement in MTE is very mechanical and just not smooth and the render is also simple, formspecs are the culmination of blandness. Animations are also lackluster in MTG, and the art design in it... looks amateurish for pixel graphics. The sound design in MTG is also lacking, even with mods.

Granted, some of it is being taken care of, like the formspecs, but the defaults are rather appaling.

0ssd wrote:Movement in MTE is very mechanical and just not smooth and the render is also simple, formspecs are the culmination of blandness. Animations are also lackluster in MTG, and the art design in it... looks amateurish for pixel graphics. The sound design in MTG is also lacking, even with mods.

The problem is that neither the UI nor the art nor the sounds were ever checked by an actual UI designer or artist. This is all developer stuff. Developer UI, developer graphics, developer sounds. Those all were made to work, and they do work. But nothing more.

Plus: The UI is Irrlicht’s default UI elements meant for prototyping being on steroids causing all sorts of issues (rendering priority of certain elements, only static elements possible, hard to extend, weird syntax transferred to an even weirder syntax, etc.).

That's all I have to say really. Movement in MTE is very mechanical and just not smooth and the render is also simple, formspecs are the culmination of blandness. Animations are also lackluster in MTG, and the art design in it... looks amateurish for pixel graphics. The sound design in MTG is also lacking, even with mods.

Granted, some of it is being taken care of, like the formspecs, but the defaults are rather appaling.

I agree about formspecs, but comparing the newest version to some older version of MC I have I must say it really performs better (maybe still not that good in speed of terrain generation, however the difference is negligible). I made this point in some other discussion here on this forum and this is that MC huge popularity wasn't really based on great graphics; it was due to the great and simple gameplay taking advantage of the primordial instincts which we all have evolutionally encoded in our personalities.

I can proove it in a very simple way: it's not high resolution graphics that make particular scenes and in-game situations believable and dramatic. Take into consideration all that low-quality CCTV recordings published in tabloids showing various accidents -- some of them are actually sequences of photos and not really movies. And this sometimes even adds more drama to the story despite the poor quality of he graphics. And, on the contrary, the well-known paradox called "uncanny valley" (which actually isn't constrained to human faces only) makes most efforts to bolster up game's immersiveness by developing costly photorealistic graphics counterproductive beacuse of the unavoidable artificiality of details which becomes all the more visible then.

Polish is definitely a big aspect of the problem, but I think there's a bigger problem: Consistency is one of the most important aspects of good UX, and Minetest doesn't handle this well at all.

On its own, vanilla Minetest Game isn't really worth playing. The game is built for modding, but because there's no clear goal or artistic vision to the base game, everyone just goes with whatever they want instead of following the base game's lead.

You can see this easily by installing a bunch of mods and looking at your creative item picker: It's not uncommon to see several art styles, different resolutions, etc. You also often have multiple mods accomplishing the same goals in slightly different ways, which can create a similar problem if you pick the wrong ones. Even if you fix this with careful picks and a complete texture pack (AFAIK only a couple of these even exist to begin with), formspecs and text follow their own style and will always contribute to this mismatched feeling.

I think it's important for people making games to think hard about the style and direction they want to take with their work. Rather than making slight variations on basic survival mechanics, people need to be bolder with their choices.

Hugues Ross wrote:Consistency is one of the most important aspects of good UX, and Minetest doesn't handle this well at all.

After thinking about it, I believe that's what I meant in my original post. Polish is a product of consistency, and I think I identified that before even thinking about posting here. I'm making a completely modular game with a MC β1.7.3 feel to it: slabs are a mod, stone is a mod, dirt is a mod, wood is a mod, with a very deep dependency tree... But a full game nonetheless... though I need art. My dirt just looks like a mess of brown pixels.

After having played Minecraft now, I have to say that for me - beeing more familiar with MT than MC - it is definitely the other way around. Sure, there are very nice things in MC, but in general MC is missing so many aspects that make building in the game easier (mods, tools, engine mechanisms, block selection, speed) - that it feels as if builders are not particulary welcome there (item drop is a very clear indication of that). Too much is sacrificed in order to make the survival aspect more challenging. Which is surprising, given that the players I know back from the MC classic days by now either don't play the game anymore or spend more time on a creative map than on a survival one. Guess eventually you'll achieve a state of "enough materials, defense and fighting skills", and the survival aspect becomes boring.

Where MC clearly is superior is presentation of mobs. If you pass by a cow or chicken or whatever mob, the mob will turn its head and look at you - which it rightfully ought to do as players can be either providers of food or deadly dangers. In MT, a sheep doesn't care if you shear it. And: Players and mobs can push each others around. That's not always ideal (a newborn chicken pushing around a huge horse? Er...), but in general helps to make the world feel more solid, more under the influence of the player. Villagers live in shabby simple huts, have illogical trade offers (a farmer bying food?) and aren't perfect in their pathfinding (though much better than what we have in MT). Yet their coded behaviour - making sounds generally understandable to all humans, regardless of which language - and gathering around and staring at players again makes them feel more "present". But only for a while. Stay there too long, and the uncanny valley will hit you. Maybe that's why villages are sometimes said to be attacked by hostile mobs in the dark if the player is there.

Graphics are nicer, but that also leads to MC running incredably bad on my hardware. It feels like walking through syrup. When switching back to MT, it takes a moment to get readjusted because the client suddenly *responds* to the mouse, and view range is high enough to actually see anything bigger than a small house.

Sokomine wrote:After having played Minecraft now, I have to say that for me - beeing more familiar with MT than MC - it is definitely the other way around. Sure, there are very nice things in MC, but in general MC is missing so many aspects that make building in the game easier (mods, tools, engine mechanisms, block selection, speed) - that it feels as if builders are not particulary welcome there

Of course, one of the most obvious indications is the world's height which could be made taller (at least in some version dedicated to builders which Microsoft certainly could afford) but isn't.

Where MC clearly is superior is presentation of mobs. If you pass by a cow or chicken or whatever mob, the mob will turn its head and look at you - which it rightfully ought to do as players can be either providers of food or deadly dangers. In MT, a sheep doesn't care if you shear it.

In Wuzzy's MC2 animals sometimes do stare at player, and the Monsters Game features quite nice behaviour of the mobs.

Stay there too long, and the uncanny valley will hit you. Maybe that's why villages are sometimes said to be attacked by hostile mobs in the dark if the player is there.

I think that the 'uncanny valley' phenomenon doesn't refer to this kind of semi-symbolic representations of real 3D objects, it's usability imo is constrained to more or less photorealistic graphics. You know, from the very start blocky characters can't be recognized as anything even remotely similar to living humans, they are here more to mark their position and occupied space and not to depict their appearance.

Where MC clearly is superior is presentation of mobs. If you pass by a cow or chicken or whatever mob, the mob will turn its head and look at you - which it rightfully ought to do as players can be either providers of food or deadly dangers.

It will be useful a mob basic API in the engine (now in the roadmap I believe). And maybe a good Lua API. Mobkit looks very promissing.

MC "feels" more involving, immersive, because it is. Background music, ambient sound, games that aren't just a sandbox.

We have CTF, Mineclone and Minetest Game (both of which aren't applicable, since they both are derivitives of MC), and a few other games, (Survivaltest, Mars, LOTT, Adventuretest, GrailTest, InsideTheBox, Flux); but, I really don't see anything compelling enough to harass my friends into playing.

The games made for MT all just seem to be lacking depth. This is not a slam on the games. Just an honest observation. Most games made for MT seem to regurgitate the same mods, expecting some dramatic difference in gameplay. This is called insanity....

Instead of breaking immersion, MT should take the leap, and use inworld items for everything. You do not craft, but have to make machines and mechanisms to manufacture. Awards and quests have actual depth, beyond, "mine a stone". Instead of having to dl 15 different mods to have a decent "Player", this should just be included. I should never have to track down why my avatar is half buried. We need MUSIC!!!! (And this coming from someone who really dislikes in game music). We need the things in the world that make noise, to make noise, instead of dl a mod that attempts to provide ambience. MT needs consistent look and feel. TPs are ok, but I can't help but think of all the time wasted recreating the same thing, just with a different look, instead of creating something new. How many default trees do we need? How about a new tree?

This utter lack of immersive depth is why MC has lost appeal, and why MT will suffer even worse. MT is a game engine. MC is a game. One is written in a low-level language, providing the best performance on metal. The other is written in a crappy script language that is infamous for it's utterly crappy performance. And yet, MC, in Java, runs better, has more depth, and well, has the marketing arm of a tech giant.

MT lacks nothing except polish. And the only way it will get any polish, is for those of use who want polish, to start "wax on...wax off"

There's a saying that goes along the lines of "80% of the work goes into the last 20% of a product". It's easy to build something functional, but taking something to the next level is a much more difficult and time-consuming process. As it's a paid product that's still selling copies even now, Minecraft's devs have had a very strong incentive to keep building and polishing. On the other hand, most (all?) MT mod authors do what they do as a hobby, and probably find the process of completing something to be a lot less interesting and fun then trying out new ideas.

On another note, I do think texture packs are a good thing overall. Not everyone likes the same aesthetics, so being able to customize is good. However, I think the 'completeness problem' affects these quite a bit as well. I'm making my own specifically because after searching, I could basically no packs that:- Were close to the default resolution (ie no HD or other hires packs)- Were reasonably polished/good quality- Supported all of Minetest Game (and ideally, a few common mods)Most of what I found were TPs that met two of the above three criteria (especially the top 2, thanks to that Minecraft to Minetest converter). And of course, for an ideal experience you need support for every mod that you're using, as well as the (currently non-themable) user interface as well.

What really bothers me, however, are mods that don't follow the look and feel of the default textures. Those mods pretty much ruin any chance of consistency, even if you choose to keep the textures default. Mod authors, if you do this please consider putting your current textures into an appropriate TP and using a common look by default. Little things like this really do make a difference!

MC "feels" more involving, immersive, because it is. Background music, ambient sound, games that aren't just a sandbox.

Albeit I find default sounds in MTGame 5.0 good enough, it's obviously true that mods featuring silent mobs feel unfinished and especially as far as sounds are concerned, MT has a lot more work to do yet.

The games made for MT all just seem to be lacking depth. This is not a slam on the games. Just an honest observation. Most games made for MT seem to regurgitate the same mods, expecting some dramatic difference in gameplay. This is called insanity....

The problem with depth,both in MC and in MT is that their gameplay was basically conceived as a very simple, graphics-based one, and since the worlds in each of them are created locally and not globally, it makes developing rich complex worlds (like, say, in Dwarf Fortress) infeasible or even impossible. Thus the only emergent complexity in both games is based on in-game player's actions, either in single- or multiplayer. But it's good enough for me; in fact MT provides enough tools to create great singleplayer survival gameplay, it's only up to balancing mod parameters and you can have game with real-life depth in that regard.

MC was never intended to provide sort of 'persistent worlds', neither does MT; and the 'depth' really cannot be expected when the NPCs spawn only in the player's field of view. That's the underlying premise for both gameplay styles and you really can't expect much when everything what happens in the world is confined to the nearest player's neighborhood and nothing happens beyond.

Last edited by voxelproof on Thu May 23, 2019 06:33, edited 1 time in total.

voxelproof wrote:you really can't expect much when everything what happens in the world is confined to the nearest player's neighborhood and nothing happens beyond.

I don't know about that, Cataclysm has a similar "reality bubble" system where things are only loaded in a radius around the player, but it manages incredible depth of gameplay. But then, most of its development goes into the base game rather than a slew of independent mods, and the core devs have a specific vision of what that game should be and where to go with it, they're not writing a "build-your-own-game" toolkit.)

voxelproof wrote:you really can't expect much when everything what happens in the world is confined to the nearest player's neighborhood and nothing happens beyond.

I don't know about that, Cataclysm has a similar "reality bubble" system where things are only loaded in a radius around the player, but it manages incredible depth of gameplay. But then, most of its development goes into the base game rather than a slew of independent mods, and the core devs have a specific vision of what that game should be and where to go with it, they're not writing a "build-your-own-game" toolkit.)

"Depth" is clearly very ambiguous term. In case of e.g. MTGame it could mean complex interdependencies of in-game items, species, complex crafting recipes and so on I guess and so is I suspect in the game you mentioned. I'd like to see something more general and independent of the screen display, some hidden underlying structure of algorithms calculating weather changes, seazons, frequency of appearance of different mobs and, most of all, an efficient, simple but well designed game mechanics enabling a player making meaningful choices which bear long-term consequences for his/her future gameplay.